13. Sofia
SOFIA
Three weeks into this job and the supply closet on the second floor still smelled like fresh paint, the kind of detail nobody else seemed to register, and I caught it only because noticing things nobody else cared about had kept me alive for four years running.
I was hunting for extra toner for the printer upstairs, the kind of task Denny handed off to whoever complained least about the stairs, and found myself digging through a shelf of forgotten supplies instead of anything resembling toner.
That was when I saw it, a second folder wedged behind a box of zip ties, unlabeled, the kind of nothing a person walked past a hundred times without ever once looking twice.
I don't know exactly what made me look twice, except that four years of training had taught me hidden things always looked ordinary, and anything that worked that hard at looking ordinary was worth a second glance.
I pulled it free anyway and opened it, and thirty seconds became one of those moments that split a life cleanly into before and after.
It was a second manifest, not the kind that crossed my desk every day, official, coded, half legible to anyone without the right decoder.
This one was plain, handwritten, cargo listed against numbers instead of names, a routing code circled twice in blue ink, and at the bottom, an account number I recognized because I had spent three weeks memorizing every account number Callahan's file had flagged as worth watching.
This one matched, not close, not similar, but an exact match to a string of digits I had stared at so many times in Callahan's briefing folder that I could have written it out standing in the dark.
Finding it here, tucked behind a box of zip ties instead of buried in some offshore filing system, felt less like luck and more like the case finally catching a break I'd actually earned.
My hands moved before the rest of me caught up: phone out, camera open, three photographs in under ten seconds, each one angled to catch the account number clean and legible. It was muscle memory from a version of my training I hadn't let myself think about in longer than I wanted to admit.
It took nine seconds. I checked the timestamps later and confirmed it, folder open to phone back in my pocket in under ten, a speed that had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with four years of evidence collection that never quite left a person once it got in.
The door swung open before I'd even slid the folder back into its hiding place.
"Oh. Sorry, didn't know anyone was in here.
" Priya from the day shift, new enough that she still wore her badge clipped where anyone could read it, leaned around the door with the open curiosity of someone who hadn't yet learned which questions got answered around here and which ones didn't. "What are you doing back there? That shelf's just old junk."
"Inventory anxiety." The words left my mouth before I'd fully chosen them, which was, in hindsight, not my finest improvisation. "I get twitchy if a shelf doesn't match the count sheet. Occupational hazard."
She blinked at me like I'd started speaking a different language, which, fair, I sort of had.
"That's a thing?"
"Apparently." I straightened, folder already back where I'd found it, my pulse loud enough in my own ears that I was fairly certain she could hear it from the doorway. "Four years in logistics does something to a person's relationship with unlabeled shelving."
"Okay." She said it slowly, the tone of someone filing me away as officially odd rather than actually suspicious, which was, all things considered, the outcome I would take every time. "Denny's looking for you. Something about toner."
"Right. Toner. That's actually why I'm in here."
"You're a strange one, Reyes." She said it without any real judgment in it, more curious than critical, and I let myself breathe again once I was fairly sure she meant it that way.
"There isn't any. Hasn't been for weeks." She was already backing out of the doorway, done with the conversation and with me. "Try the supply room on three. This one's just junk nobody's cleared out."
She left, and I stood there another full minute before my hands were steady enough to trust with anything again. Four years of training had let me photograph that folder without a single hitch, and thirty seconds of nerves had nearly undone all of it with my own mouth.
My phone buzzed before I'd made it back to my desk, Nina's name lighting up the screen, checking in the way she'd been doing more often since the karaoke night, like she'd appointed herself the unofficial guardian of my sanity.
"You survive the week?" the text read.
"Barely. Found something today. Can't talk about it yet."
"Ominous. Good ominous or bad ominous?"
"Unclear. Could be both."
"You know I'm supposed to ask if you need backup when you say things like that."
"I know."
"Do you need backup?"
I looked at my phone a long moment before I answered, the folder still sitting exactly where I'd left it two floors down, the photographs already backed up in three places out of a habit I hadn't fully unlearned.
"Not yet," I typed. "I'll tell you when I do."
"That's not actually reassuring, Reyes."
"I'm aware."
She didn't push, which was rare enough for Nina that I understood exactly how much restraint it cost her, and I put the phone away before I could talk myself into telling her more than either of us was ready for tonight.
I found Maxim on the floor near the loading dock twenty minutes later, going over a delivery schedule with one of the newer foremen, and he looked up when I passed like he'd been tracking my footsteps by sound alone.
"You look pale," he said, falling into step beside me without being asked, the easy proprietary way he did everything lately.
"Bad lighting in the supply closet. Very unflattering to everyone."
"I'll have Kirill fix the wiring."
"Please don't inconvenience an entire floor over my complexion."
"Duly noted. I still reserve the right to fix it anyway."
He almost smiled at that, the small private version he only gave me, and for one terrible second I thought about telling him. Not the truth, not really, just enough of it to watch his face change, to see who showed up once the version of him I liked best stopped being safe to keep looking at.
I didn't say anything. I asked him about Marcus's hand instead, and he told me it was healing well, and we made easy, meaningless conversation for a few minutes while my phone sat in my pocket holding a photograph that could end everything he had built.
"You're distracted," he said eventually, studying me the way he studied a manifest that didn't add up.
"Long day. Nothing sleep won't fix."
"If something's wrong, you can tell me."
"I know." The words came out smaller than I meant them to, and I hated how much I meant them anyway. "I'm fine, Maxim. Really."
He didn't push, and I was grateful for it more than I let on. He let me go with a hand at my jaw and a promise to see me before I left for the night, and I walked away from him feeling like the worst kind of liar I had ever run in four years of running them for a living.
By the time my shift ended, the folder was back exactly where I'd found it, and three photographs sat in my phone like a decision I hadn't made yet.
I told myself I would call Callahan from the parking lot, and I held onto that the whole walk out, past the loading gate, past the floodlights, past two of my own security detail pretending very hard to be interested in the fence line instead of me.
I didn't call him.
A single manifest without context was a thread, not a rope, and Callahan would want the rope, the routing pattern, the account activity, something that held up in a courtroom instead of a hunch with a good photograph attached.
That was true. It also wasn't the real reason, and I knew it even while I built the excuse carefully enough to almost believe it myself.
I thought about every case I had ever worked where waiting cost someone their freedom, or worse, and I thought about the handful where waiting had been the only reason a conviction ever stuck instead of getting thrown out on a technicality.
Both lessons held. I had simply never needed the second one this badly before.
The real reason sat under all of it, small and stubborn and entirely unprofessional.
Three photographs in my phone were the closest thing to proof I had ever held against a man I had stopped being able to think of only as a target weeks ago, and calling Callahan tonight meant making that proof real in a way I wasn't ready for yet.
For the first time since this assignment started, the evidence I had spent three weeks chasing sat right there in my hand, and instead of the relief I had expected to feel, I felt something closer to grief.
The lot sat mostly empty at that hour, floodlights buzzing overhead, my car parked in the same spot it always was, close enough to the gate that the walk never usually felt as long as it should have. It was the kind of quiet that usually helped me think, and tonight it didn't.
Tonight it felt longer. Every shadow between the light poles seemed to hold itself a beat too long, and I chalked it up to exhaustion instead of instinct, because exhaustion was easier to argue with.
I reached my car, unlocked it, and had one hand on the door when a man stepped out of the dark beside it, close enough that I felt him there before I actually saw him.
I didn't recognize him. Mid-thirties perhaps, an unremarkable jacket, the kind of face built specifically to be forgotten moments after you stopped looking at it, and he didn't reach for anything, didn't raise his voice, didn't do anything that should have frightened me nearly as much as it did.
"Evening," he said, and slid something through the gap of my half-open window before I'd even registered that he was close enough to reach it.
He was gone before I'd finished turning around, swallowed by the dark at the edge of the lot, and somewhere behind me I heard car doors, my detail finally reacting, half a second too late to matter.
I looked down at what he'd left on the seat. It was a plain white card, nothing printed on it but a phone number and four words in block letters, no name attached.
WE SHOULD TALK SOON.
I sat there in the driver's seat a long time, engine off, both hands on the wheel to keep them from shaking, and understood, without much comfort in it, that whoever had just found me in a dark parking lot already knew exactly who I was, exactly who I'd been talking to, and exactly how much that made me worth reaching.
I thought about calling Callahan right then, engine still off, the card sitting on the passenger seat like something radioactive. I thought about calling Maxim instead, and hated how much faster that thought arrived, how much less I had to talk myself into it.
Neither call happened. I drove home instead with the card face down on the seat beside me, unable to look at it and unable to leave it in the lot behind me either, and understood somewhere on the second stoplight that both of those men would want to know about this, and that telling either one meant admitting things about myself I still hadn't finished admitting alone.
I hadn't decided whose side I was on yet. Somebody else had apparently decided for me already.